The impossibility of London for young professionals is a running theme in the British press. You may have heard in recent weeks, for instance, that under-30s will need £64,800 of savings to get on the property ladder in 2020, that first-time buyers have to spend nearly £70,000 on rent before they can afford to buy a home, and that the average London home will be worth more than the GDP of Manchester by 2030, making the capital unaffordable to everyone but the offspring of Roman Abramovich.
In turn, this has led to claims that soaring house prices are “putting twentysomething Londoners off starting families”, “cutting off” graduates from the best jobs, “killing off” cool London and will, within 30 years, wipe out the middle class, leaving the capital for a “tiny elite”.
However, last week the Financial Times provided some perspective on the hysteria when it reported that just under a quarter of recent UK graduates go on to work in London and the capital’s share has actually increased slightly in recent years. Moreover, as an illustration of the continuing popularity of London among millennials, PwC admitted it is struggling to fill its regional graduate vacancies while applications for its London ones are up a staggering 17 per cent on last year.
Not that I am surprised to learn that the capital is not the dystopia it is increasingly made out to be. I have an army of nephews and nieces in the regions nearing graduation age and whenever they ask, or even when they don’t ask, my advice to them is always to head, despite all the negative press, to London to begin their careers. Why? Because:
A great job in the regions is a gateway into a British career, but a great job in London is a stepping stone to a global career. Not only is our capital unlike any other city in Britain, it is unlike any other city in Europe. Home to more than one third of all European Fortune 500 firms, it attracts three times more corporate headquarters than any other city in Europe, with Deloitte publishing a report this week that found that London has seen 235,000 high-skill knowledge-based jobs created since 2013, extending its lead over New York, where such roles declined.
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The fact is that if you are a highly skilled employee in London, you could be taking your next job in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris or Singapore, with London exporting 12 per cent more “high-skilled leaders” than New York, 24 per cent more than Paris, and more anywhere overall than any other global city.
Power still resides in London. Technology may have made decentralisation theoretically possible, and employers may be beginning to realise they need to offer opportunities outside London to attract the best talent, but for the moment large companies still function in a pretty traditional way. There was evidence for this in the FT article, where employers were quoted remarking that salary progression and promotions are much slower in the regions, that regional employees are still “treated too much like an external service provider to London” and that there remains a suspicion in large companies that “if you aren’t in London you aren’t quite good enough.”
But the centralised nature of the modern company was also reflected in a feature in The Wall Street Journal last week about how companies such as Facebook are increasingly paying staff to live close to the office in “high rent areas such as Silicon Valley and New York”. Even the most modern companies are wedded to having their most important staff based in centralised headquarters, and in the UK that place remains London.
The regions just haven’t made the case when it comes to career development.We all know from Escape to the Country and Location, Location, Location and from friends who have moved out that there is a better quality of life outside London. That there aren’t up to a dozen people competing for every room in Leeds as there are in London, and that things such as “fresh air” and “trees” exist in Norfolk.
Yet while you often hear people who have left the capital for the regions rave about the space for kids to run around, and the free car parking, and neighbours popping over for friendly chats, and the “sense of community”, you almost never hear them gloating about having a better career. And that’s because, with London accounting for 22 per cent of GDP, 19 per cent of employment and being responsible for the creation of about three quarters of all new private sector jobs since 2010, they probably don’t have a better career.
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Young people are resilient.There is no doubt that London becomes difficult once you have children. Large cities in general become more exhausting the longer you live in them and it is worrying what the housing crisis means for key workers and social mobility. But many of those worrying on behalf of young professionals are projecting their own anxieties and forgetting how flexible graduates are. Nowadays I complain if I have to commute for half an hour more than twice a week but, at 21, I willingly commuted to London from Essex five times a week on the country’s worst rail service.
The idea of letting my spare room at the age of 39 makes me shudder, but as a graduate I shared with six strangers for more than a year, putting up with their weird eating habits, body hygiene issues and infinite passive aggression without complaint. Indeed, I’d question the ambition of any 21-year-old graduate more concerned with living in a lovely three-bedroom house than having the most exciting career possible. Besides, it is infinitely easier to downsize to the regions in middle age than to upsize to London. Which is the thing: if you don’t take the opportunity to live and work in the greatest city on earth when you’re a young graduate, you may never get the chance again.